Flickr Photo: GreencolanderI'm going to ask you a question and I want you to answer without thinking.

Let's say you had $100 you had to give to someone else. It doesn't matter who you give it to, just that you give it away to a single person. Who would you give it to?

Is the first person you thought of a family member? A close friend? It probably is.

So, why wouldn't you give it to the first person in need you encounter on your way to get a latte in the morning?

The answer is trust.

You have a relationship that indicates to you that your $100 gift will have some meaning to that person, and that it will be used in a way that is satisfying to both the recipient AND you.

We know trust is a key ingredient missing in our sector these days. Paul Light of NYU's Wagner School of Public Service, conducts a regular survey about public trust. The summary of his latest study shows that trust is still declining: fewer and fewer individuals think that nonprofits are doing a good job, and more and more individuals think nonprofits are doing a bad job.

Evaluation is clearly a sticky wicket. Now that we're smack dab in the middle of the information age, it's easier than ever for nonprofits to track all kinds of data that help them measure and evaluate their performance. We know down to the minute how many people are downloading reports, signing up to volunteer, sending emails to decision makers, visiting our clinics, etc. Pervasive Internet access and ever-shrinking hardware mean that we can collect and store more data than ever before. And we can publish that data more easily than ever before, increasing our transparency as we increase our measurements.

No one will argue that this is a bad thing. But are we really measuring what matters? Do all these numbers really tell us if we are meeting our missions? Take this number. Tell me what you think this number says about NTEN:

• 7158: September site visits to date at http://nten.org.